Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow

except the news and
Wheel of Fortune
and shows like
Sanford and Son
and
Good Times,
which she watched with us when we shelled peas and shucked corn. She read the newspaper.
    She was a do-right woman, not a good-time woman. But now one of
those
women was calling
her
house for
her
husband to come meet
her
at the West End. Too many levels of disrespect.
    My mother shrieked. There was a commotion. She went for her pistol.
    While my brothers and I, like most boys in those parts, had rifles—small-caliber hand-me-downs used to keep snakes out of the grass and vermin out of the garden, and BB and pellet guns used for target practice and shooting birds for sport—my mother had the only handgun in the house.
    It seemed to show up soon after we moved to Papa Joe’s house, and like me, it followed her everywhere, tucked in her purse, nestled among peppermints and pencils. It was a business piece with no benign intent, protection for a woman who had inherited her father’s, my Grandpa Bill’s, warrior spirit, and who was now out in the world on her own.
    And she had brass knuckles stashed in the glove box. The gun and the brass knuckles were a guard against women who forgot their place and jumped slick, and against men driven crazy by thirst long after the love had dried up. These were men like the pulpwood cutter, whom she’d made the mistake of dating shortly after leaving my father. Realizing her error, she let him go, but for him letting go was hard to do. One day on our drive home from Ringgold, he tailgated us for miles, his big truck bearing down on our back bumper. When my mother had had enough, she pulled over, grabbed the pistol, and marched back to confront the man. I turned in my seat to see what would happen. I could make out only snippets of her scolding as she cursed a blue streak, using all the bad words children get spanked for using. The line I remember most was about me:
    “Are you crazy? My baby’s in that damned car!”
    He never bothered us again.
    Maybe that was why she had let my father back in: he was comfortable, and for all else he might have been, he wasn’t dangerous.
    But that morning, after a night of pleasure, a little boy’s voice on the other end of a phone had shattered her pride and broken her heart. That morning she grabbed that gun to conduct some business with my father.
    He rushed to get dressed, then burst out of the back door clutching his pants at the waist, belt dangling. He bounded down the steps and leapt across the yard and over the fence where my mother had thrown herself when Mam’ Grace died. He continued through the tall grass that grew where Papa Joe had raised the hogs, the dewy seed heads lapping at his legs as he tried to make it to the woods beyond the fence on the other side.
    My mother flung the door open behind him, her gun in hand, and began firing—her shots pierced the morning silence, but missed my father. I watched from my mother’s bedroom window as my father flinched at each explosion. But there was something in his gait that did not suggest a man whose life was in danger, but rather a rascally boy who’d been caught being devilish. It was a casual quickness, not flat-out running, that pushed him across the field, something in him that knew that something in her wouldn’t do it.
    Maybe that’s what drew a smile on my face, the idea that there was a smile on his, too, even when his pants got caught in the barbed wire of the second fence as he tried to clear it. My mother ran to her car and canvassed the neighborhood for him, but to no avail. We found out later that he had hidden in a neighbor’s house.
    Shooting a cheating husband was not uncommon. It was a thing often done. In fact, one of my mother’s best friends had shot her husband a couple years before for the same reason.
    The woman had full hips, high cheekbones, and a short fuse. She lived in a tiny house with her husband and their four children over a hill from the House with No Steps. The husband